From David Hatton, Althorne, Essex My Ebb Tide My tide has been receding very slowly, but has at last reached its end – so, time for a higher sub. to SOF.!
I was brought up in the usual way for the 1920s – much church and Sunday School. Although basically a Methodist, through much of my life I have sometimes attended Quaker meetings. I became a Methodist minister – the one described in David Boulton’s The Trouble with God as ‘a “Modernist” Christian Socialist minister’, which may imply the tide beginning to ebb even in those early days?
Unhappy experiences led to my leaving the ministry and becoming an R.E. Teacher. There I worked on the principle that I would prefer a pupil to become a thoughtful atheist than an unthoughtful Christian. In school assemblies instead of prayers I invited all present to reflect on the day’s subject – perhaps another ebb flow? and one which did not tie in with headmaster’s view. He preferred ‘real prayers’ – although he always got stuck at the phrase ‘our inestimabublleble benefits’. By now I was beginning to realise I was happier teaching about religion than preaching it.
I next became a college lecturer on Religion. My approach caused some trouble with the County Council when I invited the then president of the British Humanist Association, Harry Stopes-Roe, to address R.E. teachers.
In a conversation which ran late into the night he reckoned my ‘religious’ views were more tolerant than his non-believer’s ones.
My developing views may be apparent in the title of a series of booklets I wrote for the Methodist Publishing House The Questioning Christian. One title Did Jesus Say That?' took a few tiny steps along the path of the Jesus Seminar, which I was to encounter later.
The subject required for the final of the Times Preacher of the Year event in 1999 was ‘Christianity in the 21st Century’. I spoke of the need to make clear the real nature of the literature in the Bible and to move on from fourth century concepts and language in expressing Christian belief. Interestingly it was the non-Christians among the judges (the secretary of the National Secularist Society, Keith Wood, and Rabbi Lionel Blue) who took the trouble of making particular personal comments afterwards, and much later the latter recalled in a newspaper article points which ‘an elderly preacher’ (!) had made. How far do any of these indicate the ebbing of the tide for me I can’t be sure.
The tsunami was the beginning of the end, its inflowing waves leading to my ebb tide and eventually a full acceptance of Christian belief as a myth (though a good and useful one) – a process brought to conclusion by recent issues of Sofia.
Of course ‘unbelieving’ has its problems. A colleague felt he had to give up singing carols in the college choir because they contradicted what he taught in the lecture room. I felt this unnecessary, although it does require explaining mythological concepts to others. I used to ask school pupils if the fable of the race between the tortoise and hare was true – and ultimately one would say: ‘In a way it is’.
Where now? I like the thoughts in the 13th century Persian Muslim poet and theologian Rumi: ‘I searched for God among the Christians and on the Cross and therein I found Him not, I went into the ancient temples of idolatry; no trace of Him was there.’ He continues his search at Qandhar, Mt Caucasus, the Kaaba, and turns to philosophy, but finds God in none of them. He concludes 'Finally, I looked into my own heart and there I saw Him; He was nowhere else'.
Now, as a 91 year old, I sometimes sit watching what I call my Assisi corner with its bird feeding systems just behind a glass door, and at trees moving in the wind, the clouds, flower beds created by a lovely daughter, rabbits and blackbirds on the lawn – and I feel close to Louis de Bernières and his incredible sequence of nature’s wonders in his poem beginning 'I give thanks to God, in whom I do not believe'. 10th November (birthday): Martin Luther Martin Luther’s prosperous peasant father, a Mansfeld town councillor, was devastated when his eldest son announced that he was quitting his law studies. Put in terror of eternal judgment by the thunderbolt which killed his close friend in early July 1505, he became a monk by the end of the month. Following ordination in 1507, a wise supervisor packed him off to study theology at the University of Wittenberg, where he flourished, gaining his doctorate in 1512.